One government’s health and safety department found itself with a conundrum when it was informed that its staff would need to work from home. Prior to the pandemic, employees had always worked in the office and carried out face-to-face meetings. As a result, they had never deployed collaboration tools, which were critical to staff communicating with each other on projects remotely. In addition, there wasn’t time for a lengthy training program for a new solution.
Enabling teams to stay connected
The government department wanted an easy-to-use collaboration tool that was quick to deploy. In addition, it had to be highly secure. The department had already identified Zoom as best matching its requirements. Its IT team was impressed by the fact that Zoom was a continuously stable service, which means that even if the Internet is unstable, users will still get acceptable audio.
The government department approached Orange Business to help. As well as one of Zoom’s trusted partners, the internal IT team believed that Orange had the system integration and voice collaboration skills as well as the security expertise to quickly deploy a robust solution for 50 users. These users are primarily using the Zoom solution for internal interviews and appraisals.
As part of its security requirements, it was paramount that Zoom was not accessed through a public server. The government department required Zoom to be integrated into its on-premises infrastructure. Zoom and Orange worked on a secure platform by way of a dedicated Zoom server, which is installed at the government department’s offices. As the country was not in total lockdown, an Orange engineer was able to go on site to configure the hardware. The remainder of the installation was done remotely. The solution has been passed as category 3 in the government’s security rankings. This was previously reserved only for public switched telephone networks.
Together makes for increased productivity
The government department has been extremely pleased with the performance and productivity outcomes offered by the Zoom solution. Following feedback from the 50 users, which it used as a pilot, the government is now looking at rolling out the solution to 7,000 of its employees to improve its resilience, should a predicted second wave of the virus hit.